Ghashiram Kotwal (1976)
Director: K. Hariharan, Mani Kaul, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Kamal Swaroop, YUKT Film Collective; Writer: Vijay Tendulkar; Producer: YUKT; Cinematographer: Binod Pradhan, Rajesh Joshi, Manmohan Singh, Virendra Saini; Editor: Kamalendra Mundul, Ravindra Gupta, Ashok Tyagi; Cast: Mohan Agashe, Rajani Chavan, Om Puri, Vandana Pandit, Shriram Ranade, Ravindra Sathe
Duration: 01:43:34; Aspect Ratio: 1.333:1; Hue: 47.801; Saturation: 0.035; Lightness: 0.392; Volume: 0.081; Cuts per Minute: 2.240; Words per Minute: 3.157
Summary: This remarkable avant-garde experiment in collective film-making is based on one of the most celebrated plays in contemporary Indian theatre, staged in 1972 by the Theatre Academy, Pune (members of which participate in the film’s cast). The play used Marathi folk forms like the Gondhal and the Keertan in an elaborately choreographed musical featuring the legendary Nanasaheb Phadnavis, the prime minister of Peshwa Madhavrao II and the real power behind Maharashtra’s Peshwa throne (1773-97). The original play, a transparent allegory referring to Indira Gandhi’s reign, was adapted in order to comment on Maratha and Indian history, starting from the enthronement of the child Peshwa Madhavrao II, until the final decline of the empire and the arrival of the British (cf. Ramshastri, 1944). It presents the decadent Nanasaheb (Agashe) and his lieutenant Ghashiram (Puri), a Brahmin from Kanauj, whom he uses to mount a reign of terror in the capital city of Pune. The main plot concerns Nana’s spy network, the rout of the British at Wadgaon (1779), Ghashiram’s rise and his fall when Nana sacrifices him, and the popular revolt against Nana’s henchman leaving the prime minister (and true culprit) unscathed. The film’s main significance resides in the way it adapts theatre to investigate cinema itself, a point underlined by the chorus at the beginning of the movie and, at the end, the quote from Glauber Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes (1969) as the sutradhara (chorus) suddenly enters into the present when a truck leaves the quarry. The collective of former FTII students made one more film, Saeed Mirza’s debut
Arvind Desai Ki Ajeeb Dastaan (1978) before folding. Ghashiram Kotwal itself was subject to a court order from the bank which loaned the production finance, delaying its general screening after the premiere in Madras in January 1977.
Ghashiram Kotwal has a CBFC certificate dated 12th August 1977.
From the interview with Krishnan Hariharan conducted by Shai Heredia one learns that the film was screened “for a select bunch of film critics and cineastes in Bombay” in mid-July 1977 – and that the reaction was quite discouraging.
“It was obviously not like the play; it was not a typical Mani Kaul film; it did not have a clear-cut message like most parallel films in India had.”
The film did not find theatrical distribution, and after two festival screenings (in the Indian International Film Festival Filmotsav’78 held in Chennai in January 1978 and the International Forum of Young Cinema, Berlin in February 1978), it more or less disappeared from view till its serendipitous re-discovery and restoration in 2013.
https://indiancine.ma/documents/BRQ
Marathi experimental theatre in cinema
In this regard, the film is markedly different from its “inspiration”, Vijay Tendulkar’s Marathi play Ghashiram Kotwal, one of the most famous post-Independence Indian plays with more than 2000 performances in the last 42 years in various Indian languages.
The play was staged for the first time on 16.12.1972 by the Progressive Dramatic Association under the direction of Dr. Jabbar Patel in Pune. The production became the subject of intense controversy involving newspaper debates, street demonstrations, demands for banning all performances and destroying printed copies, court cases and threats of physical violence to the playwright and the cast (some of which were carried out in reality). The stormy events eventually led to a split in the PDA with the young members forming the Theatre Academy which continued to perform the play after 1974.
Tendulkar had characterized his play as trans-historical, stressing its allegorical nature. “ Ghashirams are creations of socio-politicalforces which know no barriers of time and place. Although based on a historical legend, I have no intention of commentary on the morals, orlack of them, of the Peshwa, Nana Phadnavis or Ghashiram. The moral of this story, if there is any, may be looked for elsewhere”. It was clear to the spectators however that the Nana-Ghashiram dynamic paralled the formation of the Shiv Sena in 1966, its use by the ruling Congress dispensation to break the trade union movement (including the murder of Comrade Krishna Desai in June 1970) and the subsequent deployment of communal and anti-outsider violence that created a pervasive atmosphere of fear.
Yukt Film Cooperative (Limited), Pune, presents - inspired by the celebrated Marathi play Ghashiram kotwal
thanks
'Financed by Dena Bank'
Screenplay/Dialogue: Vijay tendulkar, Music: Bhaskar Chandavarkar
Most of the 40 odd credited actors in the film came from the Theatre Academy. According to Hariharan, members of the YUKT collective and the actors underwent a six-day workshop with Badal Sircar before shooting began, with an emphasis on stillness rather than movement. “It was thanks to him that we learnt the importance of freezing action at appropriate moments in the film, as an interesting device to counter the idea and the basic activity of the motion picture itself”.
First documentary sequence of low-caste 'workers'
Introduction of the sutradhara: the story that will be 'without kings', also introduction of the spectators of theatre and the cinema.
At the center of the controversy around the play was the charge made by conservative forces that Tendulkar was distorting history and libelling the character of Nana Phadnavis the 18th century statesman who, in their view, had held the Maratha kingdom together and kept the expantionist East India Company at bay.
Tendulkar consistently defended himself against his right-wing critics by claiming that he had never written a “historical play”. For him, in relation to the historical characters, “to investigate whether their actions were proper or improper, and whether their existence was fundamentally meaningful or not, may be the business of the scholar of history, but it is not the playwright’s business. It is for this reason that I consider Ghashiram Kotwal an a-historical play.”
The innovative anti-naturalistic dramaturgy of the play which fused multiple folk traditions is carried over intermittently into the film as well, but the YUKT collective adopts a more decidedly “historical” approach - complete with title-cards summarizing the political intrigues, dates of treaties, birth and deaths and a Narrator who comments upon as well as participates in various events.
Of interest to note that the film says 'inspired by' the original play.
Excerpts from Nana Phadnavis' autobiography.
Unlike the predominantly hagiographic histories of late 18th century Western India written by upper caste historians like Khare, Rajwade et al in Marathi or the predominantly denigratory histories written by colonialist historians like James Grant Duff, Montstuart Elphinstone et al in English, the film seems to anticipate at least some of the positions of Subaltern Studies (1982ff) addressing the oppressed lives of social groups such as bonded labour and trying to give it a “voice” in the midst of the machinations of the rich and the powerful.
Even when the film is tracking the conventional narrative of the decades after the 3rd battle of Panipat (1761) delineating the shifting power relations between the Brahmin dominated center of Pune and the Maratha powers (primarily represented by Mahadji Shinde) it also focuses on the emergence of the English as the main competitor on the subcontinent. As the Narrator declares, this will be a different kind of film.
Introduction of the Gangabai charavter, who will bear the future king, Madhavrao.
Following the death of Peshwa Narayanrao in 1773, Nana Phadnavis managed the affairs of the state with the help of a twelve member regency council (the Baarbhai), whose primary purpose was to protect the unborn son of son of Narayanrao. The son, Madhavrao II, was borne posthumously to Gangabai. The Council was an alliance of influential Sardars including Haripant Phadke, Moroba Phadnis, Sakarambapu Bokil, Trimbakraomama Pethe, as mentioned by the sutradhara.
Further excerpts from Nana Phadnavis' autobiography. The Peshwa takes over power, which is centered entirely in Nana's hands, eventually to become a power struggle between the Brahmins and Marathas.
The song of the Mahar is preceded by a satirical expose of the Kulkarni, the traditional accounts-keeper in a village in the western India, and it brings to mind the long-standing critique of this office by the non-Brahman movement spearheaded by Mahatma Jotirao Phule:
In the most insignificant village as in the largest town, the Brahmin is the all in all; the be all the end all of the Ryot. He is the master, the ruler. The Patil of a village, the headman, is in fact a nonentity, the Kulkarni, the hereditary Brhmin village accountant, the notorious quarrle-monger, moulds the Patil according to his wishes. He is the temporal and spiritual adviser of the ryots, the Sawkar in his necessities and the general referee in all matters. (Gulamgiri/Slavery)
The film Ghashiram Kotwal like Tendulkar’s play, is part of the centuries old discursive conflict between forces of Brahmanical supremacy and the lower castes which consistently opposed their hegemony. The story of Ghashiram and Nana certainly did not originate with Tendulkar. As early as 1810, Edward Moor’s Hindu Pantheon gives a detailed account of Ghashiram’s public execution and concludes:
"Sir Charles Malet, and Mr. Uhthoff, were at Poona and were much affected by so deplorable an event, aggravated by the consideration, that it should have been effected by Brahmans; a Brahman, the sufferer, defiling almost the waters of a tank, and the holy shrine of a temple of his own foundation; and this at the seat of government, and that government Brahmanical, -thus' orced to witness a degradation unheard of perhaps in the history of their sect."
Against this attitude we have one of the first modern Marathi prose narratives in Moroba Cannoba Vijaykar’s Ghashiram Kotwal (1863), which delights in tales of Ghashiram’s idiocy and perfidy and insinuates that he attained his office by prostituting his daughter to Nana.
It is puzzling however, why the film continues to imply that Nana Phadnavis and the Brahmans of Pune were wallowing in decadence by repeatedly framing them against a dancing courtesan. 19th century intellectuals stigmatized and marginalized lower caste performance forms and incorporated Victorian standards of morality labeling folk forms like Lavani and Tamasha as obscene and indecent. Is it possible that Tendulkar’s script (with inputs from an all-male YUKT collective) is also guilty of portraying its female charcters only in sexualized terms as temptress/victim? (see Sharmila Rege. “The Hegemonic Appropriation of Sexuality: The Case of the Lavani Performers of Maharashtra” )
An oblique scene between Nana Phadnavis and Gangabai, the pregnant young widow of the murdered Peshwa Narayanrao ends with Nana closing the windows of the room and a close-up of Gangabai’s bloodied fingers.
At such moments, one can’t help wondering if the film is in some way perpetuating the gossip started by colonial writers like John Briggs and Archibald MacDonald that Nana had an affair with Gangabai and that Peshwa Madhvrao II was Nana’s illegitimate son.
"although a profound secret at the time, the young widow was deeply enamoured of Nana Farnavis… Gangabai was the cause of her own death, by having taken medicine for the purpose of concealing the consequence of her illict intercourse with Nana Farnavis...This the family deny, but the personal likeness between Nana and the young Peshwa leaves room for doubt".
The first of the series of plan-sequences on the plain: the direct reference to Jancso's cinema.
The annointing of the child Madhavrao, and the desertion of Raghoba (Raghunathrao Peshwa). The arrival of Ghashiram.
Saeed Akhtar Mirza would later write:
The grammar and language of the film is still being tortuously understood all over the world, as individual artists create their works hesitantly. Artists like Godard, Antonioni, Rocha, Ghatak, Bertolucci, Resnais, Coppola, Oshima, Ozu, Fellini, Scorcese, Chris Marker, Pontecorvo, Solas, Jansco have groped and faltered. No position is final or absolute. Any film maker in India who ignores the achievenments and progress occurring all over the world, does so at his or her own peril. The important point to note is that even where film makers have failed, one learns. A relevant failure is, perhaps, more important than a minor success.
In this context, a film which can be considered as a relevant failure is the Marathi film made by the Yukt Film Co-operative Society, Ghashiram Kotwal. The film failed to combine the epic quality of history (if history is to be understood correctly, as changes occurring through shifts in socio-economic forces rather than
through the individual machinations of kings and emperors) and the epic quality of cinema-cinema with an epic time and space scale, where cinema deals with ideas and forces and their growth over time. Individual psychological events and motivations pale into insignificance and can only be dealt with as products of a time. Change is the essence of this cinema as graphically revealed in the works of Jansco. Historical processes reveal the nature of
things as they are, not static but with a past and a future. This kind of cinema also needs a scale of operation, a vastness of approach. Perhaps the greatest drawback of Ghashiram Kotwal was its low budget. If its budget could match its conception, the film might have achieved much more.
Saeed Akhtar Mirza, 'Outlook for the Cinema', Social Scientist, Vol. 8, No. 5/6, [Marxism and Aesthetics] (Dec., 1979 - Jan., 1980), pp. 121-125
K. Hariharan, one of the co-directors of the film, later said:
'Cinema can tell the truth only when it becomes transparent to reveal itself as a language and as an apparatus at the same time. Since the viewers have the ability to ‘consume’ all the elements in the image (actors, props, location) in a reasonably fast time, the long take makes the viewers realise the sheer physicality of the image or one’s own sheer existence for its own sake. After a while, viewers are virtually staring at the image for the sake of the image without any expectations or motive, like a pure musical note or the long outstretched walls of an Indian temple. We wanted to seek a space and time which was its own form and content. Through this form and content we wanted to excite the viewer’s need to slip out of the standard mythical story of heroes and villains and enter the greater domain of real history' - interview with Shai Heredia, brochure of the Arsenal DVD
Single shot showing Ghashiram's arrival.
Extended reference to bonded labour - and the right of such labourers, working in the ravines, to 'run away' and find freedom only in some other form of bonded labour.
'Jage sari ratiya' - thumri taken from the original play, used here as a bridge: moving from the ravines and bonded labourers through the celebrations of the young Madhavrao, into the espionage nertwork that Nana sets up, and ending with Nana's plea to Sakharam Bapu to keep the Peshwa together against the Maratha challenge led by Mahadji Shinde.
Introduction of the British East India Company through the Resident Mostyn.
It is interesting to see “white” actors cast for the English characters – unlike the original play with its limited resources. The play had a solitary English man as a silent observer of the decadence and endemic cruelty of Pune in late Peshwa rule. The film ends with shots of English surveyors-underlining the introduction of predatory taxation after the Permanent Settlement of 1793. (Though it also blurs the distinctions ryotwari and zamindari) These fleeting roles are played by James Beveridge (presumably the well-known documentary film maker?) and John Irving (who went on to act as Commisioner Rand in the very different historical film 22 June 1897 made two years later by Nachiket and Jayoo Patwardhan, the costume designers for Ghashiram Kotwal. The crucial role of Thomas Mostyn, the British envoy to the Maratha dominions was played by Tom Alter, a batch senior to Om Puri in the FTII acting course. (ASIDE – Mostyn speaks fluent Hindi and broken Marathi- as Tom Alter did, Om Puri as Ghashiram is not given any speaking lines. While his silence adds to his symbolic role as Nana’s catspaw, it also creates a slightly discordant acting idiom.
The film seemingly avoids the emphasis on sexual corruption that contributed so much to the controversy around the play. Ghashiram’s daughter is absent from the film, instead there is an emphasis on Ghashiram’s importance as a spy in Nana’s political intrigues against local powers as well as the East India Company. According to Hariharan, “We wanted to see how cleverly the first forces of modernity could dislocate the Indian landlords, and eventually render them incapable of offering any form of resistance.”
This point is made with a startling vividness just before the “interval” when the quarrel between Nana and the British resident Mostyn ends with Mostyn looking up towards a pole, and instead of the expected Union Jack, we see electricity cables. Such “anachronisms” are part of the film’s Brechtian approach to the depiction of “history".
The Battle of Wadgaon described in a set of synoptic shots. the Battle itself was between the Marathas led by Mahadji Shinde and the British, championing the claim to the Peshwai of Raghunathrao (Raghoba) . The set of shots have at least three layers, the battle itself (told using the powada form), the lavani, and the 'scorched earth' strategy with which Shinde fought the British. Ghashiram's own entry -menacing the "Marathas" gathered around the bonfire, provides a fourth layer implying that Nana Phadnavis was instrumental in defeating the British and thus downplaying the role of Mahadaji Shinde. The turbulent relationship between the Brahman Nana and the Maratha Shinte is traced throughout the film (culminating in the imprisonment of Nana at the end by Mahadaji's heir Daulatrao Shinde) and continues to cast a long shadow over the cultural politics of Maharashtra even today.
Second of the big 'Jancso' epic sequences of the film.
K. Hariharan says:
In the mid and late eighteenth century, around the time when the American War of Independence, the French Revolution and the Silesian wars between Prussia and Austria were being waged, the Maratha Empire was struggling to hold onto power with the British, French and Dutch knocking on its doors. The odd man out was Nana Phadnavis. He was not royalty, but an accountant who thought he could do a better job than his employers. With all good intentions of serving the people of the Maratha Empire, he was trapped in a web of conflict, and many of them were beyond his control.
- Interview with Shai Heredia, text accompanying release of Arsenal DVD
The Treaty of Wadgaon. Mahadji Shinde re-captures Raghoba who pleads for anointment of his son Bajirao; and the further arrest of Sakharam Bapu.
The voice-over and inter-titles announce
"The young Peshwa's mother Gangabai tried desperately to forge a bond of love with her son./ When she failed, she bridged a link with death."
The image of Gangabai staring pensively out of an "open" window brings to mind the earlier sequence when Nana was alone in a room with her and after recounting his closeness with the Peshwa, had closed the window.
Clearly, the film is referring to the gossip about the affair between Nana and Gangabai and the rumor that Peshava Madhavrao II was in fact Nana's illegitimate son.
MacDonald's "Memoir of Nana Farnavis" goes so far as to state "In 1777 Gangabai, the young Peshwa's mother, died. Gangabai was the cause of her own death, by having taken medicine for the purpose of concealing the consequence of her illicit intercourse with Nana Farnavis." This continues to be debated among historians till today.
Gangabai's death.
By 1976, when YUKT decided to make a film “inspired by” Ghashiram Kotwal, the dystopian allegory framed the past decade of Indira Gandhi’s reign. Her installation by the Syndicate as the Prime Minister in 1966 and their deluded certainty that they would be able to manipulate this female puppet (Gudiya) resembles Ghashiram’s elevation by Nana Phadnavis and his subseuent excesses. More closely, Nana’s political intrigues and playing off factions against each other as well as his obsession with power at all costs bears out Hariharan’s statement that “Nana Fadnavis was Indira Gandhi. We were dealing with history, but talking about contemporary times.”
Indira Gandhi then is both Ghashiram the violently cruel legal-administartive system and his wily politician patron Nana Phadnavis, a point made with wonderful economy in the mirroring scenes between the two.
Ghashiram's tyrannical control over Pune established.
Nana's marriage, and Ghashiram's anger may appear puzzling to spectators unfamiliar with Tendulkar's play. There, Ghashiram was shown extorting the Kotwali from Nana by prostituting his pubescent daughter Lalitagauri in Act 1. When Ghashiram learns about Nana's (7th) marriage in Act 2 - signalling the end of his dalliance - and discovers the corpse of his daughter he descends into bestial rage which eventually leads to his destruction. The film version, by eliding the sexual transaction between Nana and Ghashiram and focusing on his political role as a spy, gains in scope what it loses in dramatic impact.
The finale
The 'industrial' abhanga:
Vijay Tenduikar wrote an abhang (religious song in Marathi), for the film. We used to call it an industrial abhang. Then we found that the ahhang was beginning to acquire its own religiosiiy. So we overcame the problem in the following way: some workers are working in a quarry. (And of course they hate their work; The things they look forward to are eating, and drinking).
Just then the sutradhar, now dressed as a worker, and two brahmins, also dressed as workers come down a big rock and towards the workers, chanting the abhang. As the abhang progresses, the workers all begin to fall asleep except one worker who keeps working, the sound of metal on rock punctuating the abhang - Sudhir Sonalkar, 'Ghashiram Kotwal: From Stage to Screen'
https://indiancine.ma/documents/BRS
Drought in the region: workers play Holi as Ghashiram sets up the system: of Nana's enjoyment.
Madhavrao plots to get rid of Nana.
Return of the sutradhara and the theatrical spectator who is also the citizen-spectator of the political intrigues
The revolt, and reference to the bonded labourers. at another point we jump nearly a century to 1889, where the Sutradhar announces the British abolition of bonded labour in India, only to underline caustically.
Nana’s “spiritual” discourse to Ghashiram in prison is an elaboration from a passage in the play, but it gains in intensity and irony when one remebers passages from his autobiography which are used in voice-over at the beginning.
This mirroring principle is used to wonderfully evocative effect in the sequence dealing with the death of the young Peshwa Madhavrao II. Unlike the 19th century celebrated historical play Sawai Madhvrao Yancha Mrityu (The Death of Madhavrao II, 1893), this film is not invested in the psychology of the Peshwa. In fact his death – whether suicide or accident – happens off-screen and the camera pans up a tower, the same tower from which a Mahar, singing a song of his oppression by the upper castes had fallen to his death much earlier in the film.
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